The Harpies And The Suicide Forest In Dante's Inferno

In a way, Dante created the Harpies for the reason so they could feel more pain and to release their pain. The Harpies and the suicide forest is a creative way to let the souls vacate their pain. If Dante did not create the unique suicide forest or the Harpies, the souls would not be in the amount of pain that Dante wanted them to and they would not be able to discharge the pain that they needed to. For example, Dante noticed a souls in Hell that depended on the Harpies. Dante said: “And then, perhaps because his breath began / To fail him, he stopped and hunched against a bush / As if to make himself and its branches one” (XIII. 115-117). The pain that the soul was experiencing was so profound that it needed to depend on the forest to release

The more profound that the sin that they committed was, the deeper they are frozen in the ice. All of the souls had a betrayal of trust, one being Cain who killed his brother Abel. While being in circle nine and traveling through the different pouches of circle nine, Dante and Virgil made it to Caina, named after Cain for killing his brother and losing the trust that they had as he went against his kin. After moving through the different levels of the ice, Dante and Virgil see several people that they recognize, and then Dante begins to say, “I saw a thousand faces after that, / All purple as a dog’s lips from the frost: / I still shiver, and always will, at the sight / Of a frozen pond” (XXXII. 67-70). Dante had traveled through several levels of Hell and has been through several pouches of circles, and when he saw the souls frozen to the pond, he was so disturbed that he could not get the image out of his mind. As they were moving through the frozen pond, Dante said: “I quaked in the internal chill; and next- / I don’t know whether by will or fate or chance- / Walking among the heads I struck my foot / Hard in the face of one, with violence / That set him weeping…” (XXXII. 72-76). Dante has walked around Hell for a long time and he has never stepped on a head, but when he got to circle nine and saw the frozen souls in the pond and when he stepped on one, he knew that immense pain that they were enduring because he had a sense of pain in himself for simply stepping on someone’s head. Although being in the deepest part of Hell, it includes the deepest amount of pain that was felt. Virgil and Dante journey to the deepest pouch in Hell: Judecca. As they were traveling and made it to the last pouch in circle nine, Dante says, “I drew behind my leader’s back again. / By now (and putting it inverse I find / Fear in myself still) I had journeyed down